A German organization of child-abuse survivors [spoke out against censorship in the name of “protecting children”]. I’ve always said child pornography is used as a strawman for political censorship and economic interest and that’s absolutely morally despicable. The victims add censorship actually works for the aggressors by hiding the crimes and not doing anything effective to stop the practice. Are you actually against child abuse ? Then pressure for a real investigation of the Catholic church.

On censorship, UK joins the ranks of Venezuela by approving the “Digital Economy Bill” which is about blocking sites and disconnecting random people instead of digital economy.

The US Intelligence community tried to take down Wikileaks. This in itself isn’t much of a surprise but it’s amusing one of the reasons invoked is countries such as China, North Korea and Russia block access to the site.

I’ve looked at the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator from the SDK and general assumption of the UI is: The user has a giant mental map of the UI landscape and navigates throughout the menu real-estate moving the phone screen viewport like a window.
While different, I’m fairly unconvinced it’s any good.

Uh, what do you mean 2010 ? I bet up to that last one you were thinking I was describing iPhoneOS 2.0. But no, I’m describing Windows Phone 7 Series. That’s a whole lot of embracing, and only 2 years delayed.

I’m still looking for the extend. Don’t tell me it’s the develop for Phone/PC/XBOX stuff cause that’s just going to make me smile faintly.

One size fits all tends to end up with whatever the worst platform can handle. This kind of works from XBOX and PC, with the XBOX being a crappy PC and PC developers being used to develop for crappy PCs. It doesn’t exactly work cause controls on a PC are much richer than on an XBOX. And console games are simpled down versions os PC games anyway.
But let’s face it, a Snapdragon mobile phone isn’t exactly a crappy PC. It’s not even a PC, it’s just a low power CPU with lowend 3D graphics. You’ll end up playing on your 2000USD PC a game your phone can render.

What works is having, not versions, but aspects of the game. You play some parts on the XBOX or the PC and some parts on the mobile. Example, on an adventure game you play some wicked 3D combats on XBOX and do your adventuring on the mobile taking advantage of all the nice things a mobile has, such as a touch screen and mobility. This isn’t rocket science, Nintendo did this with Zelda on Gamecube+GBA (expect the cable made it awkward), and in the end what you need for a compelling game is making the best experience possible all around, not go easy on the developers.

And after closing up shop in Portugal Blockbuster is further going bust in the US. And cause paying customers really love to be treated like criminals late fees are back cause you know, Netflix and iTunes doesn’t exist in Blockbuster’s world.

One of the reasons Microsoft is on the way down is they gave up on shipping products. The last few things that made a blip don’t actually exist. Let’s review. There’s Surface which never could make it as a product, there’s project Natal which was announced 18 months ago for 4 months ago, Windows Phone 7 Series which will exist in real hardware at best, next Christmas and now Courier which they promise will be really awesome if it ever exists.

I can imagine Ballmer standing before the Board going “We’re going to make a killing next Christmas, just you wait. We have this really really amazing stuff just about ready to come out”.